Private Viewing - Geoff Palmer
Published in 2015 by Podsnap Publishing, Inc.
I am always pleasantly surprised when I come upon a writer who knows what they are doing and cares about how they are doing it. Geoff Palmer is one of those pleasant surprises. He won some awards and spent twenty plus years doing freelance technical writing. From his bio, "he has climbed mountains in Africa, picked grapes in Switzerland, sold cameras in London programmed computers in Fiji, and spent eight years working as a professional photographer. He's also quite tall." He lives and writes in Wellington, New Zealand.
Jane Child, the protagonist of this story, is a banker. At the beginning of the novel she thought she had a straight line path to a Divisional Manager role at Bartley's Bank. It is not to be, however, because the position has been filled by a rising star in the British banking world who just happens to be the son of Sir Jamieson Trotter who has deep societal connections.
But Damien Trotter is good looking and Jane is good looking and despite her best efforts she not able to resist Damien's charms. It is not at all surprising that Damien turns out to be an ultimate salacious sleaze. What is a surprise is the role that the seemingly homeless man who sits on the sidewalk across the street from the bank plays in the story. Jane is not the most sensible young woman but she is a romantic and that gets her into trouble.
Palmer develops his characters well including the minor ones like good-old Aunt Daisy and the neighborhood cat, Bluebell. There are a plethora of spy gadgets and technology which is always fun and with Palmer's experience with computers in Fiji, I am assuming he got that stuff right. There is the occasional word that is missing, but that seems to be common, unfortunately, these days. No matter how many times you read through your own book, it is easy to see the words on the page the way you are seeing them in your head.
Private Viewing is a fun, entertaining read, with enough suspense to keep the pages turning and midnight lamp burning.
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Pressure
In the world of building science, pressure is key. The second law of thermodynamics mandates that high pressure goes to low pressure. If the pressure in the house is higher than the pressure in the chimney, the smoke goes up the chimney -- and that's a good thing! The pressure on the exhaust side of window fan is higher than the pressure on the intake side. The pressure on the supply side of an air handler fan is higher than the pressure on the return side.
Pressures in a house makes the air go around, the air go around, the air go around!
If you are designing a whole house ventilation system, the first issue is to have a pressure plan particularly if there is an atmospherically driven heating appliance. There has to be positive pressure in the combustion appliance zone (CAZ) relative to the flue so that the combustion gases flow up the chimney and not into the house.
Then you want to remove pollutants at the source, such in bathrooms and kitchens. HRAI (Heating, Refrigeration, and Air Conditioning Institute of Canada) recommends removing 60 cfm continuously from the kitchen and 20 cfm from each bathroom.
HRAI also recommends supply air to Category A rooms: 20 cfm to the Master Bedroom, and 10 cfm in single bedrooms, the Living Room, Dining Room, Family Room and other habitable rooms. They also recommend supplying 10 cfm to Category B rooms like the kitchen, bathrooms, laundry room, and utility room. Connecting the HRV/ERV to the supply side of the air handler means that the new air or fresh air will piggy-back on the conditioned air and be supplied to all the rooms. Greater fresh airflow control can be achieved by independent ventilation ducting, but that is often outside of the budget. Note that HRAI recommends lower supply rates than exhaust rates to the bathrooms and the kitchen so that those rooms will be under negative pressure.
Understanding the pressures in the house is the key to understanding how to achieve a comfortable and healthy indoor environment.
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